Behold Turkmenistan’s Marvels! (Authorized Version)

A surveillance camera peers over the edge of the independence monument in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.Credit
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan — On summer afternoons, as temperatures become stifling in the Karakum Desert, this capital often falls quiet.

Almost everyone retreats inside, except for aging ladies in blaze-orange vests who tend the government’s luxuriant gardens, and for the soldiers and the police, who watch over just about everything else.

One recent afternoon, however, one man energetically offered his version of an Ashgabat tour. “It is beautiful,” said the man, Kaka. He kissed his fingertips with an audible smack.

Kaka, quick-eyed and lean, is a driver registered to carry foreigners. In other words, he is the sort of guide that the authorities here try to steer visitors toward. This is because Ashgabat, a city of perhaps 600,000 people, is the capital of Turkmenistan, one of totalitarianism’s last holdouts.

Turkmenistan, at least in its center, is not the visually gray police state of yesteryear. It is ruled by a self-absorbed government that has unchallenged control of the country’s oil and gas wealth. One result of the mix of money and presidential infatuation without checks and balances is a building boom, centrally planned and gaudy, that has chewed its way out into the desert.

In the capital, which one foreign diplomat called “Stalin-Vegas,” white marble and green-tinted glass are in, as if the city were designed by a warden who thought public spaces should look like mausoleums viewed through sunglasses. Sprinkled throughout are golden statues, busts and placards of the designer himself, Saparmurat Niyazov, the president for life, who died last year.

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Saparmurat Niyazov, the former president of Turkmenistan, who died last year, erected a monument in which he emerges from the earth as a golden child. Credit
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

For all of their efforts at grandeur, the monuments are in their way a distraction. Much more interesting are the ways that social pressures in a police state, combined with the barrage of propaganda used to maintain Mr. Niyazov’s lingering personality cult, can twist public speech into forms at once safe and absurd.

As his car pulled away, Kaka’s first soliloquy was a dedication. “When our president addressed us he always began, ‘My dear people,’ ” Kaka said. “He never said only ‘My people.’ Never! How he loved us! Such love!”

He was silent for a while. Then he slapped the steering wheel. “Such a man will never happen again,” he said.

Mr. Niyazov was more complicated, of course, than this. While his salutations to the cowed population might have been polite, he restricted travel and allowed no opposition, free speech, public assembly, fair elections or independent news media. Perceived enemies disappeared into psychiatric wards or jails, and many have never been heard from again.

Private organizations that have tried to research the way the Turkmen government operates say that officials looted state riches and transferred the proceeds offshore. They also say Mr. Niyazov ruined the education system and acted as if AIDS did not exist, saddling his nation with a generation unprepared for modern life.

These are not safe subjects to discuss with a stranger here. Kaka did not mention them. Instead, having provided an introduction to Niyazovian forms of love, he moved on to other marvels.

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Another monument features Mr. Niyazov in front of what some call the Toilet Plunger.Credit
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

Ashgabat now has an indoor hockey rink and a swimming center to go with its soccer coliseum, where presidential celebrations are held. The city is a network of boulevards lined with immaculate state buildings, many of which appear almost empty. Thickets of cranes stand in the outskirts, as new housing towers climb skyward.

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He stopped before a Soviet-era apartment block. Across the street were new parks and buildings. Kaka pointed at the tenement. “That is where the Soviet Union ended,” he said.

This new urban landscape would not have been possible without Mr. Niyazov’s managerial acumen, he said, or his unmatched mind. “What huge numbers he handled, and none of it was on paper,” he said. Kaka tapped his temple. “All of it was in his head.”

Next stop was a government store that sells the Rukhnama, two semi-autobiographical volumes written by Mr. Niyazov that promise an era of greatness for the Turkmen people. He forced the Turkmen population to read it in schools.

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Ashgabat is centrally planned, gaudy and filled with statues of its designer, Mr. Niyazov.Credit
The New York Times

Kaka suggested that a visitor buy a copy. “It is the best book you will ever read,” he said.

Asked how many times he had read it himself, Kaka seemed surprised. “I have never read it,” he said. He thought about that answer, then added to it. “But my wife and children have read it many times!” he said. “They are always reading it. We love this book in my home!”

As he steered through the city, Kaka avoided Ashgabat’s several mass graves, where much of the city’s population was buried after an earthquake leveled neighborhoods in 1948. The fields are unkempt. The small Soviet-era monuments are in disrepair.

Mr. Niyazov did not neglect this dark episode in full. He commissioned another monument, in which the earth is being jostled on a bull’s horns. His mother rises from the broken globe, holding aloft a serene, golden child. That would be Mr. Niyazov, lest one forget.

At last Kaka parked near the Independence Monument, a white column rising from an overturned bowl. Some people here irreverently call it the Toilet Plunger.

The day was cooling. Even now, except for two soldiers standing motionless at honor guard, and the soldier who supervised them, the park was utterly deserted, as if it were already a ruin.

The sprinklers squirted and swished. The electronic eye of a surveillance camera, mounted on the monument, looked down from overhead.

Kaka was ebullient. He urged his visitor to take in the sights. “Our people love this park,” he said, throwing open his arms to the empty panorama. “Look at how they come here. The park is completely full!”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Behold Turkmenistan’s Marvels! (Authorized Version). Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe